Officers

NICOLAS BERGGRUEN is the Chairman of Berggruen Holdings, a private company, which is the direct investment vehicle of the Nicolas Berggruen Charitable Trust.

Berggruen Holdings has operations in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, as well as real estate and financial investments globally. The firm and related entities have made well over 100 direct investments during the last 20 years by committing entirely its own capital across diverse industries, both public and private and focusing on building long-term value. Investments are often socially and culturally driven. The Berggruen Group has offices in New York, Berlin, Istanbul, Tel Aviv and Mumbai.

Through the Berggruen Institute, an independent, non-partisan think tank, he encourages the study and design of systems of good governance suited for the 21st century. Mr. Berggruen is a board director of Zewail City of Science and Technology, Egypt; a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Pacific Council on International Policy.

Committed to leaving a legacy of art and architecture, he sits on the boards of the Museum Berggruen, Berlin, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and is a member of the International Councils for the Tate Museum, London and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He has collaborated on projects with such renowned architects as Richard Meier, Shigeru Ban and David Adjaye.

Mr. Berggruen was born in Paris, where he studied at l’Ecole Alsacienne before attending Le Rosey in Switzerland. He obtained a Bachelor of Science in Finance and International Business from New York University in 1981. Prior to Berggruen Holdings, he worked for Bass Brothers Enterprises on the real estate side of this family-held investment firm, as well as for Jacobson and Co., Inc., a leveraged buyout company. In 1988, Mr. Berggruen co-founded the Alpha Group, a hedge fund operation, which was sold to Safra Bank in 2004. He is a member of the WPO-Angeleno; a board member of Promotora De Informaciones, S.A. (Prisa) and Le Monde.

Craig Calhoun has been President of the Berggruen Institute since 2016. In this capacity, he has developed the broad thematic agenda for the Institute. Focusing on Great Transformations in the human condition, brought for example by climate change, restructuring of global economics and politics, and advances in science and technology, the Institute will seek to connect deep thought in the human sciences - philosophy and culture - to the pursuit of practical improvements in governance and practical action. Calhoun is now guiding the Institute’s growth with new staff, networks of fellows, and teams joining in research and intellectual inquiry. These complement and inform its extensive networks of leaders from government, business, and intellectual life.

From 2012-2016, Calhoun was Director and President of the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he remains Centennial Professor. He led major efforts to strengthen LSE’s faculty and its leadership in interdisciplinary, international social science and public policy analysis; to upgrade the quality of teaching; to improve the campus and LSE’s relations to the city around it; and to enhance equity, diversity, and inclusion. He set records for philanthropic fundraising two years in a row and established important new centers and institutes studying inequality, philanthropy and social entrepreneurship, and global affairs and enhancing LSE’s connections to major global regions from Africa to Asia.

Earlier, Calhoun was for thirteen years President of the New York-based Social Science Research Council (SSRC). He initiated projects on a range of themes including religion and the public sphere; understanding 9/11; humanitarian emergencies; the global financial crisis; housing policy; media, technology and culture; the next generation of African social science; HIV/AIDS; privatization of risk; the history of social science, and improving the effectiveness of researchers’ public engagement.

Calhoun has also been University Professor of Social Science at NYU, where he founded and directed the Institute for Public Knowledge and was earlier Chair of the Sociology Department. He previously taught at Columbia University and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill – where he served as Dean of the Graduate School, founding Director of the University Center for International Studies (now Fedex Center for Global Education), founding Director of the Program in Social Theory and Cross-Cultural Studies, and co-founder of UNITAS, an experiment in cross-cultural living and learning. He has held honorary chairs or been a visiting professor in Asmara, Beijing, Berlin, Bristol, Khartoum, Oslo, and Paris and has been honored for his teaching by awards from students at UNC, Columbia, and NYU.

Calhoun’s research has ranged broadly through social science and related fields addressing culture, social movements, education, communication, religion, nationalism, the impact of technology, capitalism and globalization, and combining critical theory and philosophy with both contemporary and historical empirical research. He has done empirical research in Britain, France, the US, China, and Africa.

Calhoun is the author of several books including:The Roots of Radicalism (2012) on the 19th century origins of modern political movements and Neither Gods nor Emperors (1994), which examined the student movement behind the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest in Beijing. In 2007 he published Nations Matter, which predicted rising nationalist and populist challenges to cosmopolitanism grounded in a highly unequal global economy. With Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Georgi Derluguian and Michael Mann he wrote Does Capitalism Have a Future? (2013), now translated into seventeen languages. He is also the editor of several books, the author of approximately 100 articles, and the former editor of two scholarly journals, Social Theory and Comparative Social Research.

In recognition of his contributions to social science research, Professor Calhoun was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in July 2015. In 2014 he received an honorary doctorate from the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, which recognized him as “one of today’s foremost social scientists.” Among his earlier awards were an honorary doctorate from La Trobe University in Melbourne, Fellowship of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Philosophical Society, two ‘best book’ prizes from the American Sociological Association, and invitations to give numerous prominent lectures, including the Tanner Lecture in Philosophy and the Willem Aubert Lecture in Sociology. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, was named an Einstein Fellow by the City of Berlin, and elected President of the International Institute of Sociology.

Calhoun received his doctorate in Politics (with an emphasis on Sociology and Modern Social and Economic History) from Oxford University, following previous study in Southern California, Columbia, and Manchester Universities, mainly in Anthropology. He is Co-Chair of the Board of the American Assembly and a member of the Board of the MasterCard Foundation and the Center for Transcultural Studies, and of the Council of the St. Paul’s Institute.

Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of The WorldPost and a senior adviser to the Berggruen Institute. He has been editor of New Perspectives Quarterly since it began publishing in 1985. He has served as editor of Global Viewpoint and Nobel Laureates Plus (services of Los Angeles Times (Syndicate/Tribune Media) since 1989. These services have a worldwide readership of 35 million in 15 languages.

Gardels has written widely for The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, Harper's, U.S. News & World Report and the New York Review of Books. He has also written for foreign publications, including Corriere della Sera, El Pais, Le Figaro, the Straits Times (Singapore), Yomiuri Shimbun, O'Estado de Sao Paulo, The Guardian, Die Welt and many others. His books include,"At Century's End: Great Minds Reflect on Our Times" and "The Changing Global Order”. He is coauthor with Hollywood producer Mike Medvoy of "American Idol After Iraq: Competing for Hearts and Minds in the Global Media Age."

Since 1986, Gardels has been a Media Fellow of the World Economic Forum (Davos). He has lectured at the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ISESCO) in Rabat, Morocco and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, China. Gardels was a founding member at the New Delhi meeting of Intellectuels du Monde and a visiting researcher at the USA-Canada Institute in Moscow before the end of the Cold War. He has been a member of the Council of Foreign Relations, as well as the Pacific Council, for many years.

From 1983 to 1985, Gardels was executive director of the Institute for National Strategy where he conducted policy research at the USA-Canada Institute in Moscow, the People's Institute of Foreign Affairs in Beijing, the Swedish Institute in Stockholm and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung in Bonn. Prior to this, he spent four years as key adviser to the Governor of California on economic affairs with an emphasis on public investment, trade issues, the Pacific Basin and Mexico.

Gardels holds degrees in Theory and Comparative Politics and in Architecture and Urban Planning from UCLA. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Lilly, and two sons, Carlos and Alexander.

Nils Gilman
Vice President of Programs

Dr. Nils Gilman joined the Vice President of Programs at the Berggruen Institute in August 2017. From 2013 to 2017 he served as Associate Chancellor and Chief of Staff to the Chancellor at U.C. Berkeley, and as the Founding Executive Director of Social Science Matrix, Berkeley’s flagship interdisciplinary social science research center. Earlier in this career, he worked as a research director and scenario planning consultant at the Monitor Group and Global Business Network, and in software companies such as Salesforce.com and BEA Systems. He is the author of Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (2004), Deviant Globalization: Black Market Economy in the 21st Century (2011), as well as numerous articles on intellectual history and political economy. He holds a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in History from U.C. Berkeley.

Dawn Nakagawa
Officers

Dawn is the Executive Vice President of the Berggruen Institute. In this position, Dawn is responsible for building the institution to become an organization of global reach and influence. Prior to joining the Berggruen Institute, Dawn was the Executive Vice President of the Pacific Council on International Policy, a global leadership network dedicated to enhancing awareness of and developing solutions to global challenges. In her position she oversaw all aspects of the organization and drove several special initiatives including the Energy, Environment and Security Committee and the Equitable Globalization Committee. She also co-directed the project on California’s Adaptation to Climate Change, recruiting the members of the taskforce which ultimately was appointed by Governor Schwarzenegger to be the California Adaptation Advisory Council to the State. Prior to joining the Pacific Council, Dawn worked as a consultant for McKinsey & Company where she developed growth strategy for Fortune 500 companies in a variety of industries, including high tech, medical device, biotech, consumer products and retail industries. She holds an MBA from University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and an undergraduate degree in Political Science from the McGill University in Canada. Dawn sits on the board of the Values Schools charter school organization, and an active member of the California Peace Action Network and California League of Conservation Voters.